Up until a year ago, I'd never visited a psychic, never had my palms or tarot cards read. I wasn't exactly a skeptic, but you have to trust the people who practice such things, you have to buy into their cosmologies, and I didn't, quite.
But for a few years, in my thirties, I called an astrologer around my birthday. I had a hippie aunt who, when I was 16, gave me a present of an astrological chart. It was fun; it seemed to confirm who I am—a pragmatic Capricorn—and the ancientness of the art, the systematicness of it, the universality, appealed to me.
The last time I talked to the astrologer, I was told two significant things. One delighted me. The other I put deep in the vault of my subconscious. That's how we in this Anthropocene era interface with the paranormal and the metaphysical. If we get a prophecy we like, we keep it at our fingertips, bring it out at dinner parties, tweet it to our followers: "@amazingpsychic told me I'd meet my soul mate next month. #cosmic #blessed." If we get bad news, we can decide that it was delivered by a charlatan and disregard it. Because our navel-gazing, technology-is-God culture doesn't fundamentally believe in anything bigger than ourselves (What could be bigger?), we don't have any rules of the road to evaluate what we hear and who is delivering our para-, meta-messages. We're each on our own recognizance.
It was a little over a decade ago. I was 39 years old, 10 weeks pregnant with my son—though after a previous miscarriage, I wasn't telling anyone about this pregnancy. The astrologer read my chart and said, "You're having a baby now or very soon." Wow, she is good, I thought. We talked about how Aquarius was in my marriage house, and so it was no surprise that my partner was an Aquarius. She told me that he was "a difficult path." Was I sure I needed to go down it? I assured her I did, because for all the difficulties, there were many more amazing moments in my life with him. Okay, the astrologer conceded; maybe he was my "destiny." Then she told me that something "wild" was going to happen around the time I was 50. "It's almost like someone around you is murdered."
That's the one I sent deep into my Gringotts vault, to be ignored and nearly forgotten. I had my son Davey, eventually married the Aquarius—a brilliant, dazzling, disheveled, funny, work-addicted, self-involved, loyal man named Peter Kaplan—and built a chaotic and emotionally rich life with him, our son, and Peter's three kids from his first marriage.
Peter was the most vivid person I've ever known. While he claimed to be an expert on everything, he actually did seem to know everything about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Kennedys, Bob Dylan, The Wizard of Oz, good grammar, David Letterman, the Great American Songbook, the golden age of Broadway, Othmar Ammann and his design for the George Washington Bridge, the New York Yankees, Spencer Tracy, Hollywood from 1920 to 1960, Ralph Lauren, and the media. He was a controlling person who thought he was always right. He hated when I wore polka dots and when I drank red wine because he said it made me a little mean (the wine, not the dots). But he was also monumentally generous, with his presents, his love, and his time. He was an editor, and a mentor to many, many people, and as a consequence, he'd get overextended, often falling into trouble with them, and us. His friend Paul had an expression for the Kaplan méthode. Peter would be poised on the brink of disaster and at the very last moment pull out a victory, a redemption, a "Kaplan finish." He was the leader of our big, bawdy, intellectually stimulated, culturally literate family, the kind I'd longed for growing up. We were lucky. We were happy.
Ten years after that phone call with the astrologer, Peter was in a bed at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he'd been for three months. He was surrounded by doctors, Paul, his son Charlie, and me, being told that his stem-cell transplant had failed in spectacular fashion (Peter did everything in spectacular fashion) and that he'd be dead in a week to 10 days. This was as horrible as you can or can't imagine, but there was torture involved, too, because only a week before, he was coming home; we were frantically readying the house for his arrival. He was doing great! "There are patients here who'd kill to walk in your shoes," one nurse had told him. As the transplant worked and his marrow began to grow, however, his lymphoma came roaring back a third time, and he, and we, made a hairpin turn back to despair. No Kaplan finish this time. It did feel like he was being murdered.
"They tell me I only have a week," Peter told his older brother in an almost quizzical tone when James arrived a few minutes later. Peter looked at the two of us, and for the first time, I really understood the marriage of ideas in the word tragicomedy when he said, "Feel free to use any of this as material."
I have experienced grief in all its parts—the "acute grief" of the early months after Peter died on November 29, 2013; and then later the "integrated" or "abiding grief," as the DSM neatly terms them (this was the period in which people liked to chirp at me that I was doing amazingly well); followed by "complicated grief" (okay, I wasn't doing so well; I was actually stuck in a black whirlpool). I felt stupid and slow, simultaneously suspended in aspic and pushed along in a swift, strong stream that I couldn't quite keep my head above. It was as if someone had taken a can opener to my edges and rolled back my skin, exposing my insides to air and microbes and every other invasive thing. It was the most painful experience of my life, and yet in the rawness of it, there was something beautiful, too. I was wide open, untethered, in ways I'd never been before. My eyeballs and skin hurt when I walked outside; it was like the feeling you get when you're just succumbing to a flu—vulnerable and odd, and on the verge.
My dreams were invaded regularly by Peter in the first months after his death, with an insistence that woke me at four in the morning almost daily. Frankly, that's how he was in life. If he called me and I didn't pick up the phone, he'd call again. And again. And again. And again. He didn't really care what I was doing that might be keeping me from calling him back; when he wanted to talk, he wanted to talk. Davey, then nine, was dreaming of him, too. One morning, he said, "Last night Daddy and I had fun."
"What'd you do in the dream?"
"We went to Game 7 of the Yankees–Red Sox World Series," Davey said.
"Who won, Boo-boo?"
"The Yankees."
"What was the score?"
"Eight hundred and three to zero."
It was Peter's sense of humor…and his idea of heaven. There's a pretty obscure film clip of him at 23, having talked himself and his younger brother, Rob, into the Yankees locker room after they won Game 6 of the 1977 World Series. Peter stands there, pretending to take notes, but he's really just gazing prettily into the camera—he was a beautiful boy—pleased for the world to see that he's in the red-hot center. In these days, Davey was sure he was communicating with his father. On New Year's Eve, as we walked down our silent suburban block, coming home from a friend's, he said, "This is the gateway to next year, Mommy. Next year at this time, we'll still be sad, but maybe we won't have the crazy thoughts in our heads."
Then he said, "Daddy is with us now. He says he wants you to hold his hand."
I was holding Davey's hand in my right, with my keys in my left—an old habit from living in the city: When walking home late at night, have your keys out. Again, Davey asked me to do it, and so I put the keys in my coat pocket and held out my left hand in the cold air.
You may be wondering what this has to do with the para- and the meta-, and I'm getting to it right about now. Because at this point, the coincidences began to occur. You may be able to explain some of them away, but not all, I'll wager. It started on Christmas Eve, when we flew to Seattle to see Peter's brother Rob. The car in front of us on the way to the airport was the same color, make, and model as Peter's, and the license plate was nearly identical to his—off by one number. The flight attendants were pouring out Aquarius water. A few weeks later, Peter's daughter Caroline got her first big break as an actor on a new TV show called Proof, about a group of people trying to determine definitively whether there's life after death. Around this time, Davey, his friend, and I were waiting in the high school hallway for baseball tryouts. Davey and the other boy were talking about what year their dads graduated from college. He asked me about Peter as he was bending down to pick up a couple of pennies he'd spotted on the floor. "Well, Dad was supposed to graduate in 1976, but he actually graduated in '77," I said. The dates on the pennies were 1976 and 1977. On the evening of February 10, 2014, which would have been Peter's sixtieth birthday, I went out to dinner with the kids and two good friends. Because I was with everyone I wanted to talk to, I left my cell phone in my bag. Three weeks later I discovered a text, sent from my phone number to my phone number, dated February 10, 8:18 P.M.: "Lisa I cannot believe I'm funny I sent you the message love you see I."
A month later, Peter's first wife, Audrey, was in a market. On the TV above the cash register, the clip of young Peter in the 1977 Yankees locker room was playing. She said it was like he was staring right at her.
In the first three to four months after he'd died, I couldn't escape the feeling that Peter was calling, calling, calling, until I picked up. I had two friends who'd faced unspeakably horrible deaths: One lost her fiancé in the war in Afghanistan. The other lost a child. Both had called a medium named Lisa Kay, and I'd known of their remarkable conversations. So on a Saturday morning in March 2014, I dialed her number and left a message: "Hi, my name is Lisa Chase. I'm a friend of X and Y, and I know you've worked with them. My husband died, and I'd like to make an appointment to talk to you."
I hung up and then walked next door to my neighbor's to borrow some sugar; when I got back, there was a missed call from a Manhattan number on my phone. I called it, and Lisa Kay answered. "I don't usually work on Saturdays," she said, "but I felt compelled to call you back now." I also knew, from others who've called her, that she usually makes a phone appointment for a couple of weeks out and then asks you to send her a check.
But on the line with me now, Lisa all of a sudden sounded a little peeved and said, "I don't like to do it this way."
"What do you mean, 'I don't do it this way'?" I was confused.
"He's here," she said. "He wants to talk now." Then, as if she were talking to someone else: "I like to get paid first." Then, addressing me, "Can you even do this now? Are you free?" Terrified and exhilarated, I said yes. This is how it began:
Lisa Kay: Who's David? Who's David? He has grown. He says, "He has grown." Testing, trial control. He's talking about goldfish. And marzipan. He doesn't like it.
Lisa Chase: I have no idea what that means….
LK: Acknowledging James. He's acknowledging someone named James. Are you writing this down? You should write this all down. Even if it doesn't make sense now, it will later.
James, of course, was Peter's brother. I was running around my house, looking for scraps of paper to write on. I found a bill from a local stationery store, forms sent home from Davey's school, a confirmation for a flight to Atlanta. I was frantically scribbling on the backs of all of them, grateful I knew how to take shorthand notes from my years as a reporter, because she was talking so fast, her melodic voice—she once thought about pursuing a career as a singer—stopping and starting, darting from subject to subject.
LK: He's talking about a ball. He says, 'Find the signed ball in the bag and give it to David.'
While Peter was in the hospital, a good friend, knowing he loved the Yankees and particularly Joe Torre, their longtime manager, got Torre to sign a baseball—a talisman. But the day I brought it in, Peter shook his head. "I can't," he said. "Put it away." I didn't know why it upset him, but I put the ball in his closet, in a canvas bag that I'd packed with his clothes and toiletries to bring to the hospital.
LK: He's showing me blood. Did he die of a blood clot? Something about blood. I'm seeing the word 'genetic.' She said it in an almost staccato fashion: Ge-net-ic.
LC: He died of a blood cancer. And his doctors told us it was probably related to the lymphoma his father died from.
LK: The reason—David will not get it. That's what he's telling me. Good for you, Peter! I like this guy. [In a different voice]: 'You can call me Pete!'
He says, 'Go ahead. You can have the red wine.'
I began to laugh. For the first time, I felt some relief from the cruelty of the way he died. This call had begun to do for me what the best antianxiety medicine and therapy had not been able to, which was pull me out of the whirlpool and see the beginning of a way out of my sadness.
Lisa would be talking to me directly, then talking to…Peter? And sometimes it was if she were Peter, talking to us both. Channeling would probably be the best verb. Sometimes she said things that made no sense to me. Maybe a third of what she said could apply to anyone who'd lost a spouse; things like, "I want you to marry again," and "It's okay that you cried in front of me." But there were many more specific things she said that she couldn't have known or Googled, as several people have suggested to me.
Anyway, try Googling the name of a person you know nothing about. It takes a lot more than five minutes to navigate to the page with the right information and absorb it all—the names and details and events.
LK: He says he controlled too much. He says, 'Take the good with the bad. I had my faults.' He's learning to be better at not criticizing.
Then she said something that shocked me.
LK: 'I'm a lucky guoy. I got the better end of the deal.'
What was amazing about this was the way Lisa pronounced it: "guoy," not "guy." It was precisely the way Peter said it, with an exaggerated Brooklyn accent. He'd use that expression when we were making up after a fight: I'm a lucky guoy…to have you. At this point I began speaking directly to him; I couldn't help myself.
LC: Peter, you weren't lucky! You died!
LK: I hear a dog barking. There's a dog with him. Did you have a dog?
LC: Yes, we did. Gracie was our dog. She died of Lyme disease. Peter felt super guilty about it—
LK: [In a grouchy tone] 'It was our dog, but it was MY dog.'
Was he social? Because people are calling out to him over there. Someone's yelling 'Pete! Peter!' I gotta calm him down.
He says, 'I was lucky to have someone so pretty and young.'
LC: I was lucky to have someone so handsome.
LK: 'That's true.'
Even in the afterlife, I was competing with others for his time. But I was weirdly comforted by the joking and grouchiness and grandiosity. It felt like my husband.
Lisa's cell phone started to die, so she gave me her home number, and I called her back. We'd been on the phone for about 45 minutes.
LK: Who met you?
LC: What?
LK: I'm asking Peter; who met you? Mom. He says mom. But he was clearly met by his father. He was starting his transition that last week.
'Did you touch my face? I wasn't in my body when you did.'
Until that last week, I hadn't been able to touch Peter's skin with my fingers or lips for three months; I wore rubber gloves and kissed him from behind a mask. A stem-cell transplant takes a patient down to zero immunity; a kiss from a wife with even a nascent cold sore can be deadly. But once we knew he was not going to survive, I took off the mask and gloves, climbed into the bed with him—he was in a morphine sleep by this time—and I did touch his face. After he died, I kissed his face and tried to close his eyes.
LK: He says, 'You did what you knew was right. I am well here.'
LC: Do you swear, Peter?
LK: 'No. But you do.'
A joke! It's true; I swear like a sailor. He hardly ever did.
LK: Who's Boo-boo?
At this I shrieked loudly enough that Davey ran into the room to make sure I was okay. Then I told Lisa that Boo-boo was Peter's baby name for Davey.
LK: He was a seal-the-deal kind of guy. He says, 'XOXO.'
LC: He didn't do that! I did that. I do that.
LK: He said, 'That's one for you.'
We'd been on the phone for a little over an hour. I thanked her and took down her address to mail a check for her $350 fee. I asked her if people ever called for another reading, and she said yes, but that she didn't encourage it. She didn't want people to become dependent; they had to move through their grief and maybe learn to recognize the signs themselves. We were hanging up when she said suddenly, "Who's Paul? Who's Paul? 'Give a hug to Paul.'"
Wherever Peter was—and let's say for the sake of argument that he was—the dog was barking, and his sense of humor was intact, as was his self-regard, and I was still trying to get his attention. The picture of life, or death, or whatever state it might be that Lisa was depicting, felt incredibly familiar. It was funny. It was almost earthy, not profound, not woo-woo. I could not shake the notion that after we hung up, he was off to a gathering with his friends Eric and Sarah, and Lem and Clay, his dad and mom. Abraham Lincoln? George and Ira Gershwin? Ava Gardner? Peter loved history, and he loved meeting famous people, and it occurred to me that the ranks of the dead could make up the best cocktail party ever. In the immediate aftermath of the call, I was filled with euphoria and flooded with an intense wave of love for him.
I began to tell people about the reading. "Wait, he's still learning not to criticize?" my friend Shonna said. "Don't you think it's weird to think of him still learning?" I called psychotherapists to try to get some kind of plausible explanation—something rooted in psychology rather than parapsychology—for why this call made me immediately feel so much better. Sameet M. Kumar, PhD, who counsels dying patients and then, afterward, their families (this is brilliant; why don't more therapists work with both the dying and their families?), and who wrote a wondrous little book called Grieving Mindfully, listened to me cast around for reasons that didn't involve spirits in an afterlife and then gently said, "Are you trying to get me to tell you that I don't believe in this? Because I do…. I've heard hundreds of these stories over the years." Another, a very respected psychiatrist, confided (though not for attribution) that he'd had his own experience talking to his father via a medium.
Peter and I had become friendly with a young physician's assistant on the lymphoma service at New York-Presbyterian. I wrote her and asked if she or anyone there had an opinion about life after death. I half expected to never hear from her again. But the next morning, this was in my inbox: "I love that you asked this question. At risk of possibly sounding 'out there' or 'psychedelic,' I absolutely believe in some form of afterlife and/or spirit activity. I think I believed in it before I started working here, but over the past 2 years, my awareness has only become heightened, as I deal with more and more life-to-death transitions. I asked some of my colleagues too and they all agreed—there is definitely something after death, but no one is sure exactly what. Some spirits of my patients are more 'active' than others, I've noticed. Not quite sure why that is either."
Then I read about a researcher named Julie Beischel, PhD, the co-founder and director of research for the Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential in Tucson. Though she was trained in pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Arizona, Beischel has for the past 12 years collected data on mediums. "I've been studying the phenomenon—is it a real thing?—and also how mediums can work better with law enforcement" and, if she can raise the money for it, she's designed a study to measure its impact on the bereaved.
Her own loss and an encounter with a medium got her interested in trying to quantify the mental-health effects of mediumship, as it's called, versus traditional grief counseling and drugs. "Our real interest is in what you can do with this," she says. "And as you experienced, it's super helpful in grief. As long as you know the scientific method, you can apply it to anything. There are all these people, mostly women, saying they're experiencing this communication with the deceased. So I'm testing them."
Her goal? That the medical establishment might recognize mediums as bona fide therapy for the bereaved. It sounds extremely farfetched, but not so many years ago, no insurance company covered acupuncture. Now, the state of California requires that all insurers do.
Not surprisingly, Beischel is running a shoestring operation and is perpetually seeking funding for her studies, for which she goes to great lengths to prevent any suggestion of "cold reading." That's the name for how a reader begins a session with generalities, pays attention to the reactions of the client—words, body language, skin color, breathing patterns, dilation or contraction of the pupils of the eye—and then tailors observations around the information conveyed. The bereaved are particularly easy marks for cold readings; we're highly motivated to find meaning in what we hear, and to hear what we want to hear about our dearly departed.
To prevent such fraud, Beischel keeps the "sitter" (the term of art for the seeker of a reading) and the medium from having direct contact. Typically, that means Beischel herself gives the medium the name of the deceased, along with five questions about him or her—appearance, personality, hobbies, cause of death, and whether the "discarnate" (the term of art for the dead person) has any messages for the relative or friend left behind. That person is then given the answers—but also a set of decoy answers from a reading done for someone else. The sitter scores both readings for accuracy, and picks which one she thinks came from her loved one.
Beischel says that sitters pick the right reading about 70 percent of the time, but that mistakes during readings are just part of the process. The reason TV mediums—which is how most people experience this profession—"seem so accurate is that they're most likely heavily edited," she says. "The theory [behind the errors] is that there's static or noise in the system. Your medium might be picking up the deceased family members of, say, a passing truck driver. As a medium, you have to have this sort of right-brained ability to hear from the dead, but also have one foot grounded to be able to differentiate the noise from the signal."
Lisa Kay works only over the phone, she says, in part to keep the reading "more pure," to avoid the "distractions" of an in-person reading. But precisely because I'm a left brainer, because I've spent my professional life as a journalist, I became determined to meet her, to report her out, to use one of my profession's terms of art. I was convinced that if I observed her body language, looked her in the eye, that if I grilled her about her job and how it works, I'd know if what had happened between us was real. I wanted to demystify the mystery.
I called her and invited her to lunch. Somewhat reluctantly, she agreed.
We met in an Upper East Side Manhattan restaurant Lisa picked; I told her what kind of bag I'd be carrying and she spotted me first. She was not the New Agey lady I was expecting. She was attractive, well-coiffed, and beautifully turned out in pink cashmere, black pants, and flats. I'm guessing that she's a few years older than I, but her age remains a state secret.
"I knew you'd call again," she said as we sat down among all the ladies who lunch and ordered a salad Niçoise and a frittata. How did she know?
"Well, I'm a medium." She giggled.
I began to ask her about how it works, the mechanics of reading, of seeing spirits.
"First," she said, "I don't talk to dead people. I don't see dead people. I hate that." It drives her nuts. "Spirits are energy—energy can't be destroyed, just read the quantum physicists. Max Planck. They're just on a higher vibrational frequency, and I have to tune in to that."
What did she do to prepare? "I meditate. I quiet my mind. I connect to my heart, set an intention to read. I make sure I'm well hydrated. I leave my problems at the door, making myself completely available to be a receiver." What happens when the signs, or "hits," as she calls them, start to come? "Sometimes it's a little movie. Sometimes a picture. A symbol. Sometimes it's just one sign—a smell." Or a sharp, fleeting pain in her head if, say, the deceased had a brain tumor.
She says she gets some of her best hits in the shower: "Water conducts energy." And at Bloomingdale's! She's quite funny. "I'm joking, but truthfully, I will go to Bloomingdale's when it's empty and walk around, and I get some of the biggest hits that way."
She's self-taught. She did not study under another medium, but she's very well read, in her field and beyond it. Later, she'd send me quotes often, about the power of intuition, from Kahlil Gibran, Albert Einstein, Ram Dass, Helen Keller, Molière, William Blake.
"Somebody called them my 'powers' the other day," she said dismissively. "They're not 'powers.' It's an ability I've worked on."
So, when did she know she had it? I asked. I sensed that she was weighing something, trying to decide whether to trust me. I later learned that she'd been approached by media people before and had decided not to participate in whatever they were offering—magazine stories, TV projects.
Here's some of what I learned over the last year about Lisa Kay:
She and her sister were raised in Switzerland, Belgium, and the Upper East Side. Her parents were divorced. Her dad was a Marine who fought in World War II and ultimately became a senior vice president of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. Her mother remarried and had one more child, a boy named Patrick, whom Lisa adored.
It was hard to get her to focus on questions about her personal life. She frequently went off on tangents, and I wondered: Was she a little ADD? Was it possible she was hearing more than one conversation at once? Or, the reporter in me feared, was she trying to avoid my questions?
She came back to the States as a teenager and enrolled at Jacksonville University in Florida. "I took a criminal-justice course there and I was fascinated, so I transferred to John Jay [College of Criminal Justice in New York]." After graduation, she interned for a year in Manhattan's 30th Police Precinct as a youth aide officer. "One detective said to me, 'You're too sensitive. You want to change everything, and that's not gonna happen.'"
So she left and worked as a flight attendant and in a nursing home, took singing lessons, and ended up in high-end fashion retail, as a sales associate at Gucci, Calvin Klein, and Bottega Veneta. "I was lost over the years," she says. "My dad was a good man, but he'd say, 'You never finish anything.'" One day at Bottega Veneta, she was taking a phone order. "I said, 'Okay, Doctor, I'll send that off to you.' And he said, 'How did you know I was a doctor? I didn't say I was.' I said, 'Yes, you did, it's right here on my paper.' But it wasn't. So I tried to explain it away—'Well, it was just your cadence'—and he sort of laughed and said, 'My dear, you have a very special gift.'"
About five years later, on her fortieth birthday, the love of her life died. "Almost immediately, I started getting psychic information. On the set of the film Serendipity, I was working as an extra, and that's when I got my first mediumship impression. I met this woman at the craft-food services table, and she started to talk to me about her losses. And I started telling her about people who'd passed. This is back in 2001.
"Then I went to see a psychic, and he said, 'I'm sorry to tell you this, but they're clapping for you; they're throwing a party for you; they're saying you're doing great work.' It was exciting but upsetting. I said, 'Can you ask them to postpone the party?'"
For a while she read people for free, practicing. But she had to eat, pay the utility bills, and a few years after that first impression, she began to charge for hour-long readings. She spends a lot of her time on the phone with clients. She has a group of good friends, psychics and civilians both, but says of her work, "Sometimes it's lonely." She felt that some of her relationships changed when she first became a medium; not quite that she was being used, but…. I imagined her job was like being a doctor; people accosting you in restaurants, trying to get free advice: "Do you mind taking a quick look at my shoulder?"
In the beginning of our acquaintanceship, I was longing for the comfort I'd gotten in that first call and I'll admit that I was hoping she'd offer me messages from Peter when we talked. Occasionally she did: "He was with you in the attic that night…. He was at Davey's dentist appointment…. Did Pete get a new position? 'Dad's proud.'"
Still, I resisted asking for more, and I had only the one reading. The power of that call made me vulnerable, I knew. I worried I might start a habit that I couldn't quit. And the more I poked at it, the more I feared it wasn't true. As the psychiatrist I interviewed said, "You didn't protect it. You told too many people."
And maybe I'd asked her too many questions. "I tell my friends I had a yearlong interview with you," she said to me recently. We talked probably twice a month—with me interviewing her or sometimes just chatting—for 14 months.
But I was getting to know Lisa. One day it occurred to me that she was more or less in the same cycle of grief as I. Because 11 weeks before Peter died, her brother Patrick had died suddenly. "I'm human, too," she's said more than once. "Sometimes people say to me, 'Oh, you can just talk to Patrick anytime you want.' It doesn't work that way."
I decided to report out Patrick. I felt sneaky and deceitful. But it seemed to me that if there were any untruths in that story, it would cast doubt over everything. One day I gingerly asked Lisa, "What record company did he run?" Gotham Records, she said. Another time, "What was his last name again?" I asked her how old he was when he died: 41. Then I Googled him.
What emerged from the Internet—and this took a lot longer than five minutes—were images of a young man with wire-rimmed glasses, a gregarious smile, and close-cropped sandy hair, his strong arms wrapped affectionately around the other people in the pictures.
Patrick Arn was the founder and president of Gotham Records and Vital Music. I listened to a podcast interview with him about his innovations at his label; he was figuring out ways to place his artists' music in video games, movies, commercials—a creative business model in a time of iTunes and Spotify disruptions. He sounded smart, scrappy, principled, vibrant. He died, at the age of 41, on September 7, 2013, from a seizure in his sleep. I found his death notice in the New York Times, and read, "Beloved son…adored brother…an inestimable, crushing loss."
Everything Lisa had said about him and her family was true. But there was something about the last phrase, in the tiny agate type of the Times, that put an end to my questioning. Lisa lost her kid brother. She says she feels some guilt that she couldn't prevent it. What a terrible burden that must be.
"Peter brought us together," Lisa says, and she means it literally. But I think that it was our shared grief, that most terrestrial of emotions, that kept us connected.
Last April her number popped up on my cell while I was grocery shopping one Saturday morning. She said, "I'm calling you because I got a sign from Peter." It was the only time she'd done this in our yearlong acquaintance. "He keeps saying the word wife. Very emphatically. Does that make sense?"
I'd always referred to Peter as my husband. What I hadn't told her was that he and I were together 17 years but only married the last 11 months of his life. He'd resisted getting married a second time. He liked calling me his girlfriend. He thought it was sexier. But I always wondered, and worried, if part of him just wanted the out. We got married, in the end, out of hope, when we thought he was at last cancer free. Not that some of the old ambivalence wasn't in effect: He was 45 minutes late to the ceremony.
"He says, 'Wife. Wife. Wife.' He wants you to know you were his wife," Lisa said.
In our early days of grieving, my son said something that I've often thought about since. We were sitting at our kitchen table, and he was heartbreakingly sad. "I wish we lived in a magic world," he said, "where science wasn't the answer to everything."
He was thinking about miracles and medicine and death. But from this distance, I think it's a lovely theory of everything.
This piece originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of ELLE.
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